Tag Archives: interest groups

Post navigation

Although the title of this program promised content about Roman Law, this program actually was a bit more focused on digitization of library materials, especially materials and collections that are unique and important to researchers. For both presenters, preserving materials is only one of several goals of library digitization projects. Both had found that, perhaps, a more important goal is fostering and optimizing the connection between people and materials.

Marylin Raisch, a long-time member of the FCIL-SIS, served as moderator and employed a question-and-answer format for Professor Kearley’s discussion, which was both highly effective and quite enjoyable.

Marylin’s knowledge of many topics, including Roman law and U.S. legal history, is quite extensive, and she probably could have offered an informative and interesting program on this topic all on her own. However, she really allowed Professor Kearley’s knowledge, expertise, and passion for the subject to shine through.

Beginning around 1920, Wyoming Supreme Court Justice Fred Blume, an expert in Roman Law, began work on his English-language annotated translation of the Codex of Justinian. Transcripts representing various stages and versions of this translation are in Justice Blume’s papers, which are held by the University of Wyoming Law Library. Professor Kearney oversaw and edited the digitization and publication of this manuscript collection, both editions of which are hosted on the University of Wyoming Law Library’s website.

Justice Blume’s personal history, as described by Professor Kearley, provided some fascinating background on his translation projects. Justice Blume, who immigrated to the United States at age 12, learned Latin in high school and ended up graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a BS in philosophy. While he did not have formal legal training, he read law in a law office, eventually becoming a lawyer, judge, and politician in Wyoming.

Throughout his life he had a deep interest in Roman legal materials, and decided to translate ancient Roman legal codes after he tried to order English translations of them from book publishers and was told there were none available.

Justice Blume was, as Professor Kearney explained, not alone in the American legal community when it came to his interest in Roman law. During the early 19th century, many U.S. legal scholars studied Roman legal materials as a part of a larger movement toward exploring the codification of U.S. law. Although that movement had receded by the end of the civil war, there was a renewed interest in using a Roman or civil law taxonomy as a means of classifying the law in the early 20th century, especially as it related to the American Law Institute’s project on legal restatements.

As Professor Kearney pointed out, the early 20th century saw a “Jacksonian” anti-elitist movement similar to that which is taking place today. To that end, Justice Blume took care to not discuss Roman law on the bench when he served as a justice on the Wyoming Supreme Court. However, as Professor Kearney mentioned, among lawyers of a certain sensibility during that time, the language of Latin and Roman law served as an “old-school tie they waved at each other.”

Professor Kearney concluded by discussing the decision he made to include versions of Justice Blume’s work in manuscript form, which includes marginalia and other notes that make it hard to read, in the digital archive. The advantage of including this as well is to create a real connection between the work and the researcher.

This conclusion created a nice tie-in to Angela T. Spinazzè’s presentation, in which she provided a more general discussion of establishing and managing digitization and digital archives projects. Ms. Spinazzè focuses on three categories of questions: who, what, and how.

First, in response to “who,” she considers who the intended audience is, which focuses the work and allows for coalescing around a shared conclusion. This also helps illuminate biases and assumptions.

Next, she thinks about the question of “what.” This means considering what the digitization project is intended to accomplish, and what the consequences would be of not digitizing the materials.

Finally, the “how” question focuses really on the materials themselves: how should what you are digitizing be presented to target audiences, and, perhaps unexpectedly, how will the digitization project advance the purpose of the organization? Can it, for example, foster greater collaboration across more institutional departments? Is a natural outcome of the work the identification of more shared activities across the organization?

The Oxford project sounded particularly interesting. It saved from destruction a collection of lantern slides and glass plate negatives that had been abandoned in an archive. As it turned out, in addition to saving the original materials, the digital library also provided a wiki-like forum in which researchers and scholars could tag the images (using a controlled vocabulary) and provide new content of the scenes as they had been re-photographed over time.

Overall, although the program was not exclusively about Roman law, it provided a thoughtful forum for contemplating the values of digital collections, and provided insight into how the audience could consider undertaking similar projects at their home libraries.

I was walking home from the Hyatt after the conference ended and an AALL member stopped me on Michigan Ave. to tell me how much she loved Chicago. That made my day. I sent colleagues all over the city during the conference—to the Chicago History Museum, Wicker Park, Old Town, the CAF boat tour dock, the West Loop, and to Eataly (they owe me a huge cut). Throughout all of this, I was supposed to be writing up reports of various programs/meetings, and I got a little behind. The following are short summaries of several events from Sunday, July 17:

After Mateo’s talk, the Latino Caucus began its business meeting, led by Chair Marisol Florén-Romero (Florida International U). The Caucus discussed a number of proposed projects, including one called “Latino Voices.” The goal of this initiative would be to compile information on selected members of the Hispanic legal community, including law librarians. These personal profiles would be featured on the Caucus’ web page.

Matt Katz

Asian Legal Information in English: Availability, Accessibility, and Quality Control: This was a very interesting and useful program; kudos to all the presenters who covered China (Alex Zhang, U of Michigan), Hong Kong/Macao (Anne Mostad-Jensen, U of North Dakota), South Korea (Juice Lee, Northeastern), and Japan (Mike McArthur, U of Michigan). The presenters did an excellent job of explaining the complexities involved in translating the law from these jurisdictions and the inherent pitfalls of English-language translations. Free websites and commercial databases were presented, and in some instances demoed live. Juice Lee’s PowerPoint slides are posted on AALL’s website.

Foreign Law Selectors Interest Group: The meeting drew about 30 attendees, and was led by Marci Hoffman (UC Berkeley). Schaffer Grant recipient Rheny Pulungan of the University of Melbourne’s Law School Library offered a brief overview of her library’s print and electronic resources, which she described in more detail during her presentation on Monday, July 18 (summary forthcoming). Representatives from the Law Library of Congress, Yale, Harvard, NEFLLCG, and LLMC Digital provided updates. The LA Law Library was not represented, as Neel Agrawal has left his position there. Marci also brought the group up to date on recent developments related to the Foreign Law Guide (FLG) and Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP). Regarding the former, there are newly-updated entries for Azerbaijan, China, France, Japan, and Mexico. Updates for Germany, South Korea, and Switzerland have been completed and will be loaded soon; revisions for Argentina, Chile, Italy, and Spain are in the works. She also indicated that the IFLP will soon have a multilingual subject thesaurus and that the database will be adding 10 new Japanese journals. Marci will post the full minutes of the meeting on the Foreign Law Selectors Interest Group web page.

Rheny Pulangan

Before closing, I want to say just a bit about the convention center’s DuSable room, which apparently piqued the interest of a few FCIL-SIS members. I’m quite sure the room is named for Jean Baptiste Point DuSable who is known as the founder of Chicago. DuSable was purportedly a Haitian of African and French descent who established the first permanent settlement here in the 1780s. Next time you’re in town, check out the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.

This year, Catherine Deane led and coordinated the Teaching Foreign & International Legal Research Interest Group meeting at the AALL Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois. She invited three speakers to present on their teaching experiences:

Alexis Fetzer explained how she, as a librarian without the FCIL title, successfully proposed and taught an FCIL research course at the University of Richmond School of Law. You can read more about Alexis’s experience in the May 2016 issue of the FCIL newsletter.

Nina E. Scholtz spoke about her experience in creating an experiential learning course for LLM students. She shared her syllabus for that course and recommended implementing interactive discussion during class to overcome cultural differences.

This year’s Jurisdictions Interest Groups Joint Meeting was a fantastic opportunity to hear from our FCIL-SIS colleagues on interesting topics and interest group projects.

——————————————-

Jennifer Allison from the European Law Interest Group kicked off the meeting with an informative discussion of recent changes to German asylum law. First, Jennifer explained that asylum for the politically persecuted is a constitutional right in Germany, under Grundgesetz article 16a. She highlighted three 2016 laws related to German asylum law:

The Data Exchange Improvement Act, aimed at improving procedures for the exchange of data between government groups and other entities dealing with refugees;

The Act Introducing an Accelerated Asylum Procedure, which explains how accelerated asylum procedure will work for those cases where a fraudulent application for asylum is expected or where there’s a potential risk to the safety of the country by an applicant; and

The Act Simplifying Expulsion of Foreign Criminals and the Broadened Suspension of Refugee Recognition for Criminal Asylum Applicant, which amends earlier asylum laws.

She also discussed the Integration Act, the latest asylum legislation, which has yet to come into force and encourages asylum seekers and grantees to participate in training programs to help integrate them into German culture.

Jennifer also provided a handout with various German law sources and other helpful sources, which can be found on her German Law Research Guide; it includes a section on German asylum law. She also highly recommended following Jenny Gesley, who is the German Law Specialist at the Library of Congress, on Twitter for updates relating to German law. One other resource she highly recommended is the Linguee German-English Dictionary, which gives good examples of legal terminology in context.

——————————————-

Next up were Juice Lee and Steven Alexander de Costa, speaking on behalf of the Latin America Interest Group. They presented the IG’s progress on the “Guide to Legal Research on Cuba.” The guide will include information on Cuba’s history and Cuban law. It will also include both Spanish and English language resources. The expected completion date of the guide is September 1st, 2016, and the group is still deciding on where to publish the guide after completion.

Steven discussed a little about his experiences working on the legal history portion of the guide. He explained that the project was unique because materials relating to Cuba’s legal history weren’t widely available, particularly in English. He noted that he learned some interesting facts about Cuba’s legal history, including that the modern history of Cuba began with the 1959 revolution, and that the legal system entwines both civil and socialist law, as well as some common law. Interestingly, Cuban law still owes a lot to Spanish civil codes.

In the discussion that followed the update, it was noted that LLMC is currently working on digitizing approximately 200 Cuban materials, and that the National Library of Cuba has joined to cause and is helping find rare titles and more materials. Teresa Miguel-Stearns also briefly discussed her recent trip to Cuba.

——————————————-

The third speaker was Yemisi Dina from the Africa Interest Group, updating the group on completing phase one of her the South Western Nigeria digitization project. One recent development is that she’s created a blog, digesting cases before customary courts in two cities in South Western Nigeria.

Yemisi shared several observations with the group:

Customary law has a future in the legal system of Nigeria and other African countries. Customary courts are disorganized, but the government is interested. Yemisi noted that the government put a structure together for her to visit.

The resolution process is open to everyone, not just certain demographic groups. Yemisi observed that educated people are using the customary courts to resolve their disputes.

The majority of issues before the customary courts are divorce; rent; and child custody. Yemisi mentioned that land disputes used to be before the courts a great deal, but that those disputes have died down.

The courts face several challenges, including financial issues, as they are not funded by the government; limited resources, such as courts having only one staff person working at the court; and a lack of technology.

Yemisi welcomes comments about and suggestions for her project.

——————————————-

Finally, Steven Perkins from the Indigenous Peoples Interest Group gave an interesting talk on some of the issues regarding DNA testing of Indigenous Peoples.

First, Steven discussed some of the different types of DNA testing that can take place, including the testing that can be done to determine the ethnic groups from which a person gets their DNA. Next, Steven provided a brief history of the relationship between scientists and Native American tribes, namely that scientists have been analyzing tribe blood over the last 50 years, but that some challenges arose in how scientists were using their samples. Scientists conducted research beyond the scope of what they told the tribes would be done, gave samples out to other scientists, and moved around the blood samples to different schools. As such, the tribe had to set some boundaries and recollect the blood that had been passed around. As such, tribes have created a guide to decide how to approach these situations. The guide is found on the National Congress of American Indians website. Most notably, the tribes keep the data and keep custody of the samples, and have procedures for determining whether a person is part of a particular tribe.

Thank you to all the speakers for presenting such a robust Jurisdictions IG meeting!

FCIL-SIS invites all AALL conference attendees to join us for our Jurisdictions Interest Groups Joint Meeting this Sunday, from 12:30pm to 2:00pm, in the Hyatt-Water Tower Room. The program will include substantive presentations from several of our interest groups, as well as 15 minutes at the end of the meeting for each group to discuss their plans for the coming year.

Everyone is welcome to attend the presentations and to check out our interest groups, so please spread the word to anyone interested in these areas of foreign law. FCIL-SIS looks forward to seeing you there!

The Latin American Law Interest Group is excited to announce its forthcoming publication, “Guide to Legal Research in Cuba” (edited by Julienne Grant, Sergio Stone, and Marisol Florén-Romero.)

The purpose of the Guide is to provide a snapshot of Cuban law and legal research as they exist in the political fluidity of the moment. Historical context will also be included. Research for the project in general has been painstakingly difficult. Both Spanish and English-language resources will be covered.

Twelve authors have contributed to the project, which is currently in the editorial phase. The IG expects to complete the guide by September 1, after which it will be submitted to a journal or published in open access.

Want to learn more? The Latin American Law Interest Group will give a brief presentation on the development of the research guide at the FCIL-SIS Jurisdictions IG Joint Meeting, to be held on Sunday, July 17, 2016, 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM, in the Hyatt-Water Tower Room.Presentation by Steven Alexandre da Costa (Boston University School of Law) and Juice Lee (Northeastern University School of Law.

At the upcoming AALL Annual Meeting, Professor Emeritus Timothy Kearley and digital projects consultant Angela Spinazzè will present a two-part program on creating exciting visual experiences in displaying special collections. First, Professor Kearley will describe the fascinating story of discovering manuscripts on Roman law and Latin translation of Justinian’s Code undertaken by Justice Fred Blume in the early 20th century. The orderliness of law concerned the ancient Romans and American codifiers, and an early taxonomy of law emerged. Then Angela Spinazzè, who has worked at the Art Institute of Chicago, will show beautiful visuals from her past projects for institutions in Chicago and Oxford that exemplify the best approach to creating functional and engaging virtual research experiences like the University of Wyoming’s unique online realization of Blume’s translation.

For those attending the conference, the location is the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Hyatt-Columbus EF at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, July 19th.